E-commerce technology enables consumers to purchase items of merchandise on-line. Pioneers of e-commerce include Amazon.com, Inc. of Seattle, Wash. and eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif. Generally, e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com have focused on enabling companies to sell merchandise on-lines from websites that act as virtual stores. eBay added the ability for individuals and companies (“sellers”) to auction both used and new items of merchandise to the highest bidder. Because of the complexities and risks associated witch auctioning items of merchandise, the eBay system includes a means for buyers and sellers to exchange information, separate from the main bidding mechanism.
More recently, online marketplaces for online buying and selling of services such as programming, web design, accounting, legal, writing and translation have emerged. One pioneer of online service marketplaces is Elance, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. Elance allows a customer to describe a project, offer the project to service providers, registered with the Elance service, to bid on, accept bids from such service providers, and select a bid.
Thus, services marketplaces now enable providers of services and individuals as well as companies seeking services (henceforth referred to simply as customers) to discover each other and enter into services agreements.
Typically companies that provide online services including, but not limited to, technical support and customer service, maintain a call center in which employees or contracted workers are available to respond to incoming phone calls, emails and to engage in chat sessions. Various methods are used to direct an incoming request for service to an employee or contracted worker. Such schemes include round robin, next available and others.
In a service marketplace, there may be several providers of services, henceforth referred to as providers, available to respond to an incoming request for service at any instant. In a chat-based system, the chat message includes information describing the request for service. Using prior art methods for selecting a provider from a group of available providers, the information in the chat message is not taken into account. Thus, information that might help select the best available provider to respond to a request for service is not taken into account.
There is thus a need for a system that enables the information in a chat message to be taken into account when selecting an available provider to respond to an incoming request for service.
In a service marketplace, typically the customer selects the service provider based on information made available by the service marketplace. Thus, the burden of reviewing information and making a selection of service provider falls on the customer. However, it is the service providers themselves who are in the best position to determine whether they are suited to provide a particular service to a customer. Therefore it would be advantageous, in a service marketplace, to enable the service provider to participate in determining whether he/she is suited to provide a service requested by a customer.